THE QUIET KILL

4 stars out of 5 

This is described as a standalone thriller, but it seems to me to have all the makings for the start of a series. That would make me happy because I found the main character, police detective Jamie Day, to be quite interesting. To be sure, I enjoyed this one, although I’d describe it as gritty and sexually explicit.

The year is 1987, and the “star” of the show, Jamie Day, is a police detective who’s just come to West End London Central Police from a relatively quiet seaside town. Not only must he learn to navigate a huge city with which he’s unfamiliar, his first day on the job, the 22-year-old runs smack dab into a dead body – one that’s been chopped up in pieces, no less. Worse, more dead bodies turn up in relatively short order – a clear sign a serial killer is having a gay old time.

Readers follow Jamie as he finds housing, works on not getting lost in and around the city and on the developing relationships with department co-workers (some decent, others a bit shaky, at least at the start). In between those chapters are those that focus on the victims and the killer, so readers know what’s going down long before Jamie and his team get a clue.

Things work out in the end in a way that, as I mentioned before, hints at more to come – so I’ll be watching to see if that happens. Meantime, I thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to get in at the beginning by way of a pre-release copy. Thoroughly enjoyable!

The Quiet Kill by Robert Bryndza (Raven Street Publishing, July 2026); 390 pp.